tongues, but by new forms of government, new associations of ancestry, new and generally hostile objects of national boast and gratulation. While on the other hand, throughout the vast regions included within the limits of our republic, not only the same language, but the same laws, the same national government, the same republican institutions, and a common ancestral association prevail, and will diffuse themselves. Mankind will here exist, move, and act in a kindred mass, such as was never before congregated on the earth's surface. The necessary consequences of such a cause overpower the imagination. What would be the effect on the intellectual state of Europe, at the present day, were all her nations and tribes amalgamated into one vast empire, speaking the same tongue, united into one political system, and that a free one, and opening one broad unobstructed pathway for the interchange of thought and feeling, from Lisbon to Archangel! If effects are to bear a constant proportion to their causes; if the energy of thought is to be commensurate with the masses which prompt it, and the masses it must penetrate; if eloquence is to grow in fervor with the weight of the interests it is to plead, and the grandeur of the assemblies it addresses; if efforts rise with the glory that is to crown them; in a word, if the faculties of the human mind, as we firmly believe, are capable of tension and achievement altogether indefinite;

Nil actum reputans, dum quid superesset agendum,

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then it is not too much to say, that a new era will on the intellectual world, in the fulfilment of our country's prospects. By the sovereign efficacy of the partition of powers between the national and state governments, in virtue of which the national government is relieved from all the odium of internal administration, and the state governments are spared the conflicts of foreign politics, all bounds seem removed from

the possible extension of our country, but the geographical limits of the continent. Instead of growing cumbrous, as it increases in size, there never was a moment since the first settlement of Virginia, when. the political system of America moved with so firm and bold a step as at the present day. If there is any faith in our country's auspices, this great continent, in no remote futurity, will be filled up with a homogeneous population; with the mightiest kindred people known in history; our language will acquire an extension, which no other ever possessed; and the empire of the mind, with nothing to resist its sway, will attain an expansion, of which as yet we can but partly conceive. The vision is too magnificent to be fully borne; a mass of two or three hundred millions, not chained to the oar like the same number in China, by a brutalizing despotism, but held in their several orbits of nation and state, by the grand representative attraction; bringing to bear on every point the concentrated energy of such a host; calling into competition so many minds; uniting into one great national feeling the hearts of so many freemen; all to be guided, persuaded, moved and swayed, by the master spirits of the time!

Let me not be told, that this is a chimerical imagination of a future indefinitely removed; let me not hear repeated the ribaldry of an anticipation of two thousand years-of a vision that requires for its fulfilment a length of ages beyond the grasp of any reasonable computation. It is the last point of peculiarity in our condition, to which I invite your attention, as affecting the progress of intellect in the country, that it is growing with a rapidity hitherto entirely without example in the world. For the two hundred years of our existence, the population has doubled itself, in periods of less than a quarter of a century. In the infancy of the country, and while our numbers remained within the limits of a youthful colony, a progress so rapid as this, however important in the prin

ciple of growth disclosed, was not yet a circumstance strongly to fix the attention. But arrived at a population of ten millions, it is a fact of the most overpowering interest, that, within less than twenty-five years, these ten millions will have swelled to twenty; that the younger members of this audience will be citizens of the largest civilized state on earth; that in a few years more than one century, the American population will equal the fabulous numbers of the Chinese empire. This rate of increase has already produced the most striking phenomena. A few weeks after the opening of the Revolutionary drama at Lexington, the momentous intelligence, that the first blood was spilt, reached a party of hunters beyond the Alleghanies, who had wandered far into the western wilderness. In prophetic commemoration of the glorious event, they gave the name of Lexington to the spot of their encampment in the woods. That spot is now the capital of a state larger than Massachusetts; it is the seat of a university as fully attended as our venerable Alma Mater; nay, more, it is the capital of a state from which, in the language of one of her own citizens, whose eloquence is the ornament of his country, the tide of emigration still farther westward is more fully pouring than from any other in the union.*

I need not say, that this astonishing increase of numbers, is by no means the limit and measure of our country's growth. Arts, agriculture, all the great national interests, all the sources of national wealth, are growing in a ratio still more rapid. In our cities the intensest activity is apparent; in the country every spring of prosperity, from the smallest improvement in husbandry to the construction of canals across the continent, is in vigorous action; abroad our vessels are beating the pathways of the ocean white; on the inland frontier, the nation is journeying on, like a healthy giant, with a pace more like romance than reality.

*Mr. Clay's late speech on Internal Improvement,

These facts, and thousands like them, form one of those peculiarities in our country's condition, which will have the most powerful influence on the minds of its children. The population of several states of Europe has reached its term. In some it is declining, in some stationary, and in the most prosperous, under the extraordinary stimulus of the last part of the eighteenth century, it doubles itself but about once in seventy-five years. In consequence of this, the process of social transmission is heavy and slow. Men, not adventitiously favored, come late into life, and the best years of existence are exhausted in languishing competition. The man grows up, and in the stern language of one of their most renowned economists,* finds no cover laid for him at Nature's table. The smallest official provision is a boon, at which great minds are not ashamed to grasp; the assurance of the most frugal subsistence commands the brightest talents and the most laborious studies; poor wages pay for the unremitted labor of the most curious hands; and it is the smallest part of the population only that is within the reach even of these humiliating springs of action. We need not labor to contrast this state of things with the teeming growth and noble expansion of all our institutions and resources. Instead of being shut up, as it were, in the prison of a stationary, or a very slowly progressive community, the emulation of our countrymen is drawn out and tempted on, by a horizon constantly receding before them. New nations of kindred freemen are springing up in successive periods, shorter even than the active portion of the life of man. . While we spend our time,' says Burke on this topic, in deliberating on the mode of governing two millions in America, we shall find we have millions more to manage.'† Many individuals are in this house, who were arrived at years of discretion when these words of Burke were uttered, and the two millions, which Great Britain was

*Mr. Malthus.

† Speech on Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775.

then to manage, have grown into ten, exceedingly unmanageable. The most affecting view of this subject. is, that it puts it in the power of the wise, and good, and great to gather, while they live, the ripest fruits of their labors. Where, in human history is to be found a contrast like that, which the last fifty years have crowded into the lives of those favored men, who raising their hands or their voices, when our little bands were led out to the perilous conflict with one of the most powerful empires on earth, have lived to be crowned with the highest honors of the Republic, which they established? Honor to their gray hairs, and peace and serenity to the evening of their eventful days!

Though it may never again be the fortune of our country to bring within the compass of half a century a contrast so dazzling as this, yet in its grand and steady progress, the career of duty and usefulness will be run by all its children, under a constantly increasing stimulus. The voice, which, in the morning of life, shall awaken the patriotic sympathy of the land, will be echoed back by a community, incalculably swelled in all its proportions, before it shall be hushed in death. The writer, by whom the noble features of our scenery shall be sketched with a glowing pencil, the traits of our romantic early history gathered up with filial zeal, and the peculiarities of our character seized with delicate perception, cannot mount so entirely and rapidly to success, but that ten years will add new millions to the numbers of his readers. The American statesman, the orator, whose voice is already heard in its supremacy, from Florida to Maine, whose intellectual empire already extends beyond the limits of Alexander's, has yet new states and new nations starting into being, the willing tributaries to his sway.

This march of our population westward has been attended with consequences in some degree novel, in the history of the human mind. It is a fact, somewhat difficult of explanation, that the refinement of the ancient nations seemed almost wholly devoid of an